“You are so gross!” Aimee turned her head away from her friend. “I can’t even look at you.”

Mary Jo’s rat-a-tat-tat laugh spewed across the table at Aimee, along with some of her partially chewed pizza. She’d been showing off how she could flip a mouthful of pizza on her tongue, “Just like they flip the whole pizzas in the oven.”

Who did that? It was disgusting.

Without looking at it, Aimee flicked away whatever had just landed on her forearm. She felt a wadded-up napkin hit her on the cheek. She sighed and turned back toward Mary Jo, careful to keep her eyes squinted in case Mary Jo was doing something else that was grody.

“Why do you do stuff like that?” Aimee asked.

Mary Jo laughed again. “Because I can.”

Aimee shook her head. How was it she’d been friends with this freak of nature for eight years?

Instead of being at home, curled up in her cozy room on her frilly pink window seat, reading the book her dad had bought for her on his latest business trip, Aimee sat across from Mary Jo in one of the red booths at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, a half-eaten slice on the table between them. On the stage to their right, the pizzeria’s animatronic performers—Freddy, the brown bear in the top hat; Bonnie, the blue rabbit with the red bow tie; and Chica, the yellow chick with the bib and the mouthy pink cupcake with googly eyes—were performing a toe-tapping rock song. The music was loud, but it still didn’t drown out all the other noise in the restaurant. The place was filled with animated conversation, laughter, happy squeals, utensils clinking against plates, and the pings and beeps and warbles from the games in the arcade just off the dining room.

Although Aimee liked the pizza, she didn’t enjoy the raucous chaos at Freddy’s. She was a quiet girl, more content by herself than in crowds.

Mary Jo, on the other hand, loved the craziness at Freddy’s. She especially loved the music. At the moment, she was bobbing in her seat, right on beat with the music. Her frizzy brown hair had a different, syncopated, rhythm—bouncing on the offbeat. Mary Jo’s hair, like Mary Jo herself, had always had a mind of its own, even when she was three. When Aimee had worn her blonde hair in pigtails, a braid, or a ponytail in preschool—like nearly all the other three-year-old girls, Mary Jo never wanted to restrain her hair. She refused to let her mother control it with hair ties or braids or clips. She wanted it to fly out from her head like a lion’s mane, wild and free, the way Mary Jo liked to be. And even back then, Mary Jo usually got what she wanted.

Mary Jo and Aimee were exact opposites. That’s why they had been friends for so long, according to Aimee’s mom. They balanced each other out.

Like right now. Aimee was frowning, her face screwed up in protest of the noise and her weirdo friend’s antics. Mary Jo was smiling widely, flashing her big mouthful of equally big teeth, now stained with sauce from the pizza. Yuck. She had sauce on her round cheeks, too. Aimee didn’t bother to tell Mary Jo about the sauce. Mary Jo wouldn’t care; she might even go so far as to put sauce on the other side, too, and call it war paint. Whatever was normal was often the opposite of what Mary Jo wanted to do.

Mary Jo took another big bite of pizza, chewing with her mouth open. Aimee made a face and pushed away the remains of the piece in front of her. She’d lost her appetite, which was never as big as Mary Jo’s anyway.

“Are you done?” Mary Jo asked.

Aimee nodded. She didn’t bother to explain why.

“You need to eat more. You’re bony,” Mary Jo said.

“So what? You’re pudgy. You’re always saying not everyone should be alike.”

Mary Jo swallowed her pizza—thank goodness—and picked up her soda to take a long suck through the straw. The clackety-suctioning sound that indicated the bottom of the glass prompted her to pull back and scowl at the ice cubes that remained.

“You’re right, I’m wrong,” Mary Jo said. “Okay, so if you’re done, do you want to play in the Hiding Maze?”

Aimee shrugged and nodded. She still would rather be home reading, but she’d predicted Mary Jo would want to play in the Hiding Maze, so she’d brought a new book with her. It was tucked into the cute fanny pack her mom had bought her, along with strawberry-flavored lip gloss, her hair brush, and some money.

The Hiding Maze, short for Freddy’s Hiding Maze, was a fancy hide-and-seek game played in a network of tunnels that ran between the walls enclosing Freddy’s main areas—dining, arcade, kitchen, restrooms, storage, stage, etc.—and the exterior walls of the restaurant. It was pretty cool, actually. The hiding places were little cubbyholes with doors; the doors had tiny windows you could peer out of when you were hiding—probably so kids didn’t feel trapped. The windows were made of that special glass that looked like a window on one side and a mirror on the other. If you were a seeker, you could only see the mirrors on the cubbyholes as you walked down the tunnel, while hiders could look out without being spotted. Even though the game and its cubbyholes sometimes made Aimee a little nervous, the hidey-holes were cool for a different reason: They appealed to Aimee’s natural desire to be by herself. Only two people played the Hiding Maze at a time, so when you were in the game tunnels, you were far from all the craziness in the rest of the restaurant.

When she and Mary Jo played, Aimee always preferred being the hider, and Mary Jo loved being the seeker. Mary Jo was never happy sitting still. She liked to be doing something, and she loved a challenge. Aimee assumed this was why school was so hard for her friend. Mary Jo was bored out of her mind in the classroom. She was constantly getting caught doodling in the margins of her notebook instead of taking notes while the teacher was talking. But really, it’s more than doodling, Aimee thought. Mary Jo didn’t draw actual things, like recognizable things—she made patterns and shapes was all—but they were supercool patterns and shapes. Aimee had seen stuff like it in an art museum her mom took her to once. She had tried to tell Mary Jo she had talent, but Mary Jo shrugged it off. “Nah. I’m not talented. I’m just a pain in the butt with a good friend.” Aimee had hugged Mary Jo then, feeling a big wave of affection for the girl who often made her want to scream.

The Hiding Maze was a great way for both girls to do the things they liked, together—sort of. It worked because Aimee had figured out a way to cheat … in reverse. Because of the way she played, Aimee got some quiet time, and Mary Jo got a challenge.

“So, are you going to sit there, or are you coming?” Mary Jo asked.

Aimee blinked and looked up at Mary Jo, who was dancing around at the end of their booth, shrugging into her backpack and doing odd gyrations to the music at the same time.

“Oh, sorry. I was thinking.”

“You do too much of that.” Mary Jo laughed loudly and punched Aimee in the arm.

Aimee squealed and rubbed her arm. That was another thing Mary Jo was good at: throwing an unintentionally hard punch.

When Aimee and Mary Jo had met at age three, they’d both been small for their age. Other than that, they hadn’t had much in common … and they still didn’t. Aimee was light haired and pale skinned and had small features with bright-blue eyes. Mary Jo had that brown frizzy hair and large mouth, along with caramel-colored skin, big brown eyes, and a wide nose. As they grew up, their size similarity changed, too. Aimee remained small, but Mary Jo shot both up and out. She was six inches taller than Aimee now, and as Aimee had reminded her, she was pudgy. She was also a lot stronger than Aimee, both physically and in all other ways, actually.

Sometimes, Aimee thought about not being friends with Mary Jo anymore. They had so little in common. But Aimee would never have the heart to dump Mary Jo as a friend. Mary Jo had gone through enough dumping.

Mary Jo’s parents were really young when they got married and had their daughter. Too young, according to Aimee’s mom. Mary Jo’s dad left his wife and daughter when Mary Jo was just a baby. Mary Jo’s mom had tried to take care of her daughter after that, but she gave up when Mary Jo was five. One day, she just left, and Mary Jo ended up in foster care. That’s where she still was, now on her fifth foster family.

Aimee had asked her parents to take in Mary Jo on more than one occasion, but her mom said they didn’t have the “resources” to “handle” Aimee’s friend. She didn’t mean money. Even though she was just a kid, Aimee knew her family had plenty of money. Aimee’s mom meant time and patience. Aimee’s parents both worked important jobs. Her dad was a “high-level manager,” which meant her dad told other people what to do. Her mom was a “marketing consultant,” which meant her mom advised other people on how to sell their brands and stuff. Aimee’s parents had a lot to do and a lot of people depending on them.

If Aimee had to be honest, though, she was sometimes glad Mary Jo hadn’t come to live with them. She loved Mary Jo, but Mary Jo could be very annoying … displays of partially chewed food being just one good example. Mary Jo could be really yucky when she wanted to be. Sometimes Aimee wondered if that was a by-product of her tough upbringing. It was like she wanted people to look at her, whether for a good or bad reason.

“Well?” Mary Jo asked. “Do I need to punch you again?”

Aimee blinked. “What? Oh, no. Don’t punch me again! I swear I’ll stop thinking. Let’s go play in the Hiding Maze.”

Mary Jo grinned and took Aimee’s arm. Skipping, she began pulling Aimee toward the arcade. All Aimee could do was follow, scowling at Mary Jo’s back as Mary Jo yanked her between the tables and around other kids. Mary Jo’s overstuffed backpack made it look like she had a hump on her shoulders.

According to Aimee’s mom, Mary Jo would have a real hump if she kept carrying her backpack around everywhere. “The way she hunches her shoulders to carry all that weight,” Aimee’s mom often said, “it’s not good for her.”

Aimee had told Mary Jo about what her mom had said, but Mary Jo laughed it off. “So what if I end up with a hunchback, like some old witch?” She curled forward, squinted her eyes, put her hands into claw shapes, and cackled like a wicked witch. “That’d be fine. No one would mess with me if I looked like that.”

“You’re weird,” Aimee had said.

“You’re not,” Mary Jo had responded. “I think not being weird is worse.”

Aimee knew why Mary Jo carried her bulging pack with her wherever she went. One day, when she was throwing a fit over something one of the other foster kids had done, Mary Jo had shown Aimee everything in her pack: her favorite clothes, a picture of her mom, her hug-worn teddy bear, her pillow, pens, crayons, a couple of books, pj’s, slippers, a big detangling hairbrush Aimee didn’t think Mary Jo ever used, her toothbrush, her zipper purse filled with a few dollars and some coins, a few battered candy bars, a bag of peanuts, and her diary. “I can leave whenever I want,” Mary Jo had said. “See? I have what I need.”

“Where would you go?” Aimee had asked.

Mary Jo had shrugged. “I don’t have to plan everything, do I? I’ll just go.”

Gazing at Mary Jo’s backpack now, Aimee wondered whether it still had all the same stuff in it. It had been a year, at least, since Mary Jo had showed Aimee what was in the pack. Had she added anything? Had she taken anything away?

Aimee let her friend drag her all the way through Freddy’s packed dining room full of big round tables surrounded by laughing families. At least they hadn’t been sitting out here. That was one thing she and Mary Jo agreed on—they preferred the booths to the tables. The booths were separated from one another by low dividers painted with cartoonlike images of the animatronic characters. It made each booth seem like its own little room.

Mary Jo kept pulling Aimee, and Aimee went along until they were just inside the edge of the arcade. There, however, Aimee faltered. Then she stopped. Something—no, someone—a man—had caught her eye.

“Aimee, what are you doing?” Mary Jo asked. Actually, she shouted. She had to shout to be heard over all the screams and dings and sirens in the game area.

But when she shouted, the man Aimee had spotted turned to look at the girls. Aimee flushed and stood on her tiptoes so she could whisper in Mary Jo’s ear. “There’s something creepy about that man over there.”

Mary Jo immediately looked around. “What man?” she asked in yet another shout.

Aimee winced when the man shifted his attention fully to Mary Jo.

“Shh,” Aimee hissed. “Come on.” She tugged on Mary Jo’s arm.

But Mary Jo pulled away. She took two steps toward the man, put her hands on her hips, and yelled out, “It’s not polite to stare, creep!”

“Mary Jo!” Aimee whispered intensely.

Aimee felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up from her skin as she watched the man, a tall and skinny guy with long, greasy hair, give Mary Jo the kind of grin Aimee’s mother would have called “impertinent.” The guy’s dark, almost-black eyes were narrowed with unnerving intensity. He had yellowed and crooked teeth, and his face reminded Aimee of one of those scary wrinkled Halloween masks. All the guy needed was some blood dripping from his mouth, and he could have been the bad guy in a horror movie. Wearing stained, baggy clothes, he looked like a street person. What was he doing in Freddy’s?

“Come on,” Aimee urged Mary Jo.

Mary Jo wouldn’t budge. She jutted out her lower jaw in an act of defiance and squinted at the man. “You want a piece of me, creep?”

Aimee rolled her eyes and groaned. Mary Jo watched too many cop shows.

Aimee tried tugging on Mary Jo again.

Mary Jo suddenly laughed, and Aimee dropped her arm.

“What …?” Aimee began.

Then she saw that the man was gone.

Mary Jo spun in a circle and did a little boxing motion. “Nobody messes with me or my friend!” she yelled out.

The other kids in the arcade looked over at her for a few seconds. Some of the kids gave her dirty looks. Then all the kids returned to their games.

Mary Jo took Aimee’s arm. “Stick with me. I’ll protect you from the creepazoids.”

Aimee smiled but then shivered. She glanced toward where the man had been standing. He was gone … Aimee hoped.

“How about we do something different today?” Mary Jo asked as they approached the beige grate that covered the rainbow-colored entrance to the Hiding Maze game.

Aimee loved that the entrance to the Hiding Maze game didn’t look like the entrance to a game. It just looked like a heater vent cover or something surrounded by an arched rainbow. She knew that most parents didn’t even know the game existed. The rainbow looked like a wall decoration, not the start of a game. Aimee and Mary Jo had only learned about the game a year or so before. By then, they’d been coming to Freddy’s for several years.

One day, a little blond kid named Alby, who Aimee and Mary Jo only knew from Freddy’s, came over and said, “You’ve been coming here enough. We think you’re ready.”

“Ready for what?” Mary Jo had asked.

Alby had just grinned and told them to follow him. He’d led them back here to this grate surrounded by the rainbow. Mary Jo had threatened to beat him up if he was going to do something mean to them. He’d just rolled his eyes and opened the grate. Then he’d pointed at a digital game display, which was on the left wall of a small, low, box-shaped chamber just beyond the grate.

With walls of knotted pine and a red floor covered with a multicolored rag rug, the tiny space looked like an elf’s living room. It was just big enough for a couple of kids, crawling or sitting down. The room contained the grate-covered entrance on one wall; the game console and framed pictures of Freddy, Bonnie, and Chica on another wall; and a red vinyl mini-sofa big enough for two kids to sit on against a third wall. The wall behind the sofa was painted with a mural of thick evergreen trees dripping with moss. The scene reflected the look of the game itself. On the fourth wall, opposite the grate, a round opening revealed a long, dim tunnel.

Above the display in the elfin living room, where the players’ names were put in, the name of the game was printed in black block letters: FREDDY’S HIDING MAZE HIDE-AND-SEEK GAME. Next to the game’s name, an image of Freddy had a speech bubble. The rules of the game were printed inside that bubble.

Aimee thought it was cool that they were now part of something that seemed like a secret club. So did Mary Jo. Mary Jo liked it even more than Aimee did, probably because she didn’t get to be part of anything else, secret or not.

“What do you want to do differently?” Aimee asked now as she dropped to her knees, pulled open the grate, and crawled through the opening behind it. She gave a half second’s thought to the cute raspberry-colored capri pants she was wearing—they’d be filthy when they were done with the game. She shouldn’t have worn them today, but she couldn’t help herself.

Aimee could hear the scuffles and grunts of Mary Jo following her. Mary Jo didn’t care about her clothes. She was usually dressed as she was today—in stained jeans and a too-tight T-shirt.

Once she was inside the little game entrance room, Aimee looked at the console. The display would have players’ names on it if a game was in progress. It would be blank if no one was in the game.

Two names were on the display, and Freddy’s voice announced, “Welcome to Freddy’s Hiding Maze Hide-and-Seek Game. Please wait. A game is currently in progress.”

Aimee crawled over and sat on one end of the red sofa. Mary Jo shifted and planted her butt on the other end. She had to bend forward because of her backpack.

Turning to look at Aimee, Mary Jo said, “I want to be Player Two first today.”

“What?” Aimee rotated to stare at her friend. “I’m always Player Two first. I hide first. You seek first. That’s how we always do it.”

“I know. Boring, right? We need to mix it up,” Mary Jo said.

Aimee opened her mouth to object, mostly just because she didn’t like the way Mary Jo bossed her around. But really? Did it matter that much? She shrugged. “Whatever.”

Mary Jo crossed her arms and closed her eyes, looking pleased with herself.

Aimee cocked her head and studied Mary Jo. She looked the same way Aimee’s cat looked when she sat in a sunbeam with her eyes closed. Aimee always thought her cat looked stuck-up when she did that. Mary Jo did, too.

Aimee opened her mouth to ask Mary Jo why she always had to get her way, but then Freddy’s voice announced, “Ready for new Player One and Player Two. Please input player names.”

When Aimee was very little, she’d thought Freddy was actually inside the games that had his voice. Now that she understood they were programmed prerecorded voices, she always laughed at herself when she heard the games’ audio.

Mary Jo opened her eyes and pointed toward the console. “Go on. You’re Player One.”

Aimee glared at Mary Jo. “Fine, Miss Bossy Pants.”

Mary Jo gave Aimee a huge grin.

Aimee snorted. “You’re incorrigible.” She’d just learned that word the week before. It fit Mary Jo perfectly. She really couldn’t be corrected or improved. She was always going to be just as she was now.

Mary Jo grinned even wider and blew a kiss to Aimee. “I love you, too.” She pointed at the game console again. “Go on. If you can find me in three minutes, I promise we’ll spend the rest of the day doing what you want to do … after we play both rounds.”

“I want to read my new book.”

Mary Jo stuck her finger in her mouth and made a gagging sound. Then she laughed at the look Aimee gave her. “Fine. We’ll go to your house and sit in your room. You can read, and I guess I’ll draw … if you find me in three minutes.”

“And if I don’t?”

“We’ll keep doing what I want to do.”

Aimee sighed. “Fine.” She crawled over, knelt in front of the game console, and typed in her name as Player One and Mary Jo’s name as Player Two. As soon as she finished with Mary Jo’s name, the Freddy voice said, “Player Two, please find your hiding place.”

Aimee turned, stuck her tongue out at her bright-eyed, wild-haired friend, then returned to the little sofa. That was where the seeker was supposed to wait while the hider went to hide.

Mary Jo flashed Aimee with a huge smile and waved before disappearing into the main tunnel. “Good luck finding me,” she called out.

Aimee didn’t bother to answer. She just crossed her arms and sighed. She was tempted to get out her book, but if Mary Jo chose a spot quickly, Aimee would waste precious minutes putting her book away. So, she just sat and waited. She counted to see how long Mary Jo took to hide.

Aimee had just whispered, “107,” when Freddy’s voice announced, “Player Two has chosen a hiding spot! Player One, find Player Two! Go!” Aimee scooted off the sofa and started crawling through the main tunnel as fast as she could go.

“Fast” wasn’t really that fast in the Hiding Maze. All the tunnels in the Hiding Maze game were sloped. Some went up and some went down; none were perfectly level. Most of the tunnels curved this way and that. They were constricting and confining, with ceilings that often felt like they were pressing downward, trying to bury you alive. Only the main tunnel was straight, but it went uphill. Aimee couldn’t go as fast as she wanted to.

The Hiding Maze was designed so that only half the hiding cubbyholes were open at the start of the game. When Player Two found a hiding place, the door of that cubbyhole and all the other open cubbyhole doors were closed. The doors that had been closed then opened. So, Aimee didn’t have to search the entire maze, but just searching the closed doors would take long enough.

Every tunnel in the maze was lined with the rough spongy material, colored to look like the bark of evergreen trees, like the ones in the mural. They weren’t real trees, of course, but they felt like it. They smelled like it, too. The whole Hiding Maze had a musty, earthy smell that always made Aimee feel like she was crawling around in dirt burrows. The floor of the tunnels even looked like dirt: brown and uneven and kind of squishy like wet mud. Aimee didn’t know what the tunnels were made of—not mud, obviously, because she never got muddy.

Interspersed between the trees, big gray fake boulders created nooks and crannies for the hiding cubbyholes. Each hiding cubbyhole was covered with an arched wood door that looked like the entrance to an elf’s or fairy’s home. The little viewing one-way windows were round insets in the upper part of the doors.

From the tops of the tunnels, fake tree branches tickled the top of Aimee’s head as she passed under them. They were loaded with fine moss that looked like silky green hair, which made them hang low and heavy. Occasionally, one strand would flutter over her face and make her feel like she was going to sneeze.

Aimee thought the whole Hiding Maze was kind of spooky, especially because the trees weren’t the only thing lining the walls. Here and there, little plump gray wormlike things wiggled as you went by. They had googly eyes that rolled around. Aimee tried not to look at them. In a few places, just mechanical eyes peered out between the tree trunks. Those eyes rolled around, too, and they bothered Aimee more than the worms because she imagined the eyes belonged to awful creatures lurking behind the trees.

The tunnels weren’t so dark that they were terrifying to be in, though. Strings of rope lights that looked like tree roots lined the bottom and top edges of the tunnels and surrounded each cubbyhole. But it was still kind of an eerie place. The game had its own soundtrack, which played on a loop from a dinged-up old cassette tape that was warping in places. The track was mostly rain forest sounds, some of them soothing, like the constant patter of a steady downpour, spattering the trees and forest floor. But every now and then, other sounds would cut in: creepy screeches that could have been monkeys … or maybe jaguars. When you were hiding, you felt kind of safe, sheltered from the noise, secure in your chosen cubbyhole. When you were seeking, the soundtrack put you on edge; the growls and shrieks never failed to give Aimee goose bumps.

Everything about the Hiding Maze felt old to Aimee. She wasn’t sure how long Freddy’s had been here, but the Hiding Maze seemed ancient. In addition to the game’s worn soundtrack, a lot of the tree bark and moss were breaking off, and the cubbyhole doors were scratched and warped. It felt to Aimee like the Hiding Maze had been a big deal at one point, but now it was mostly forgotten, so it wasn’t being maintained.

Even though the floors of the Hiding Maze tunnels weren’t made of real dirt, they were always dirty—covered with scuff marks and food stains and littered with debris left behind by other seekers. She was pretty sure the Freddy’s employees never cleaned back here. Aimee saw some confetti sprinkled along the edges of the passageway she crawled through and a deflated balloon lying outside one of the cubbyhole doors—those had been here for months now. Some kid had lost a striped sock with a hole in the toe just a few feet into the main tunnel.

Aimee had lost something in the maze a few months before. Mary Jo had made her a red-beaded friendship bracelet, and Aimee had noticed it was missing from her wrist after one of their games in the Hiding Maze. She’d thought Mary Jo would be upset about the loss, but Mary Jo had just shrugged and said, “It’s probably in one of the cubbyholes. We’ll find it one of these days.” They hadn’t found it yet.

You weren’t supposed to bring food inside the Hiding Maze, but most kids didn’t follow that rule. Right now, for example, the tunnel smelled strongly of chocolate, and Aimee had to crawl around a few fresh, glistening brown stains on the side of one of the boulders—some kid must have brought chocolate cake in here. He (she guessed it was a boy) had even left a broken red plastic fork behind.

As she neared the end of the main tunnel’s first leg, she spied the other game console, which displayed her name as Player One and Mary Jo’s name as Player Two, and a running timer showing how long it had been since the game had started.

Staring at the bright timer against the relative dark of the tunnel, Aimee’s head started to hurt. She noticed she was grinding her teeth, something she did when she was upset. That always made her head hurt. She concentrated on relaxing her teeth, but the ache remained. She was tired of always going along with whatever Mary Jo wanted.

Aimee reached a closed cubbyhole door and lifted its little round metal handle. It clicked when she lifted it. Peering into the empty cubbyhole (of course she wouldn’t find Mary Jo that easily), Aimee regretted their three-minute bargain. There was no way she was going to win that fast.

Aimee wasn’t sure how long it would take to crawl up and down every meandering tunnel in the Hiding Maze. She’d never done that. But she knew it would take way longer than three minutes.

The Hiding Maze rules allowed Player One to search for Player Two for as long as it took to find Player Two’s hiding spot. However, the game also allowed Player One to give up if he or she got tired of looking. Win or lose, Player One and Player Two switched places after the first round of play. The truth was that Aimee had never even tried to find Mary Jo in the Hiding Maze before. She liked to be the hider first because she could get her book out and read while she hid. Mary Jo never gave up, and sometimes it took her a long time to find Aimee. Aimee read until Mary Jo found her. Once they switched places for Round Two and Mary Jo was hidden, Aimee would usually just sit in the tunnel and read some more. Mary Jo thought Aimee was searching for her, but Aimee was actually just hanging out. After a little while, she’d press the “Give Up” button on the game console, and all the cubbyhole doors would open. At that point, Aimee would put her book away and meet Mary Jo outside the game, congratulating her on another win.

Going first meant Aimee couldn’t pull off this trick as easily. And taking the bet meant she couldn’t do it at all.

Now, frustrated and tired with her growing headache, Aimee was tempted to just sit in the tunnel and read for her remaining minutes before pressing “Give Up,” but she really didn’t want to hang around Freddy’s all afternoon. So, for once, she tried to find her friend.

Wriggling through the first few twists and turns off the main corridor, Aimee threw open cubbyhole doors right and left. Grumbling to herself about how she was ruining her pretty pants—she’d crawled through grape juice in the first thirty seconds—she started getting more and more annoyed with every door she opened.

Of course, Mary Jo wasn’t behind any of the doors, and Aimee’s head was hurting again. “This is stupid,” Aimee whined out loud.

Deciding that she was wasting precious time opening doors because Mary Jo was probably on the backside of the game, Aimee put her head down and just crawled at superspeed toward that area. She’d find Mary Jo there, for sure.

To get to the back of the game, Aimee had to pass the end of the main corridor. As she did, she glanced toward the entrance to see if anyone was waiting to play.

It looked like someone was. The grate was missing, and the entrance was open.

Aimee started to crawl on, but then she saw movement out of the corner of her eye. Turning, she nearly choked on her sharp inhale.

The man she’d seen in the arcade was peering in through the open entrance.

And he was looking right at her.

Frozen in midcrawl, Aimee could do nothing but stare at the man, who gazed back at her with the same wide grin he’d given Mary Jo in the arcade. The grin dropped Aimee’s body temperature so fast that she felt like she’d just been flash-frozen. Every hair on her body bristled.

Aimee wasn’t sure how long she and the man looked at each other. It felt like forever, but it was probably just a second or two. She didn’t seem to be able to move.

But when the man stuck his head farther in through the game entrance, a movement that coincided with one particularly loud screech from the game soundtrack, her body decided it was time to get going. Aimee let out a little squeal and started crawling as fast as she could toward the exit.

That was it. She’d had enough. Forget finding Mary Jo. Aimee just wanted out of the Hiding Maze.

Aimee panted heavily and scrabbled noisily as she crawled the first several feet away from the main tunnel, but then she slowed and did her best to control her breathing. Trembling, she looked over her shoulder to see if the man was catching up to her.

She didn’t see him.

But she heard him. At least, she thought she did. Even over the rain forest soundtrack, she could make out a few scuffles and thumps that seemed to be coming from the main tunnel. Forcing herself not to scream in terror, Aimee put her head down and started crawling again.

By the time Aimee was nearing the game exit, she knew more than three minutes had passed; it didn’t matter what she did next. Mary Jo would be telling Aimee what to do for the rest of the day.

As if that was her biggest problem. The truth was that Aimee no longer cared what she did later today. She just wanted to get out of the game and get away from the creepy guy.

Seeing that creep again was the last straw. Aimee didn’t want to be anywhere near Freddy’s. She wanted to go home.

Twisting toward the game’s exit, which also exited to the back alley of the building itself, Aimee checked over her shoulder to be sure the creepy guy hadn’t followed her.

She didn’t see anything. No one was behind her.

Aimee pushed the heavy wood door open. When the fresh air hit her, she breathed it in and then exhaled in relief.

As she climbed out into the bright afternoon sun, though, she paused and looked back at the tunnel. Mary Jo was still in there. What if the creepy guy found her?

Aimee chewed her lower lip. She frowned. Finally, she shook her head.

No, he wouldn’t find Mary Jo. She was hidden. It was much more likely he would have found Aimee, who was out in the tunnels.

Later, Aimee would explain to Mary Jo why she left. Mary Jo would understand.

---

Stringy hair falling over his dark, evil gaze, the creepy man reaches out and pulls on the cubbyhole handle. The door opens slowly, relentlessly, eventually revealing what it always reveals: Mary Jo, wide-eyed and pale. Launching herself at the man, Mary Jo screams and scratches at his bare arms. She’s a fighter, and she’s not going to let him take her easily. But Mary Jo is no match for the man’s strength. He clamps her arms to her sides and drags her from the cubbyhole as Mary Jo screams what she always screams: “Aimee! Aimee where are you? Help! Why did you leave me?”

Aimee’s eyes shot open. She rubbed them with trembling hands as she reoriented herself to wakefulness. Taking a ragged breath, she realized where she was. She’d been studying, and she’d fallen asleep.

Even though sun splayed over the beanbag chair where Aimee was curled up in the corner of her dorm room, she felt chilled. She always felt chilled after that dream.

Aimee hugged herself, rubbing her arms to try to warm up. Face it, she thought, you’re not going to be able to read today.

She never could read on this day.

This sunny day in mid-May might not have been a day that meant anything to anyone else, but to Aimee, this day had great meaning, just not “great” as in good. Aimee actually hated this date, and it never passed without her being aware of it … from the moment she got up in the morning to the moment she finally fell asleep at night, which generally didn’t happen until she’d done a lot of staring at the ceiling and even more tossing and turning.

Aimee sighed and dropped her book. What was she thinking, trying to read a book on the future of corporate economics on a day like today?

Stretching her legs, Aimee stood and wandered over to the window that looked out over the quad below. She twirled a few strands of her long hair, watching a couple guys she knew play Frisbee. They were good; the disc flew low and straight over the top of a couple dozen sun worshippers and last-minute studiers, and it never hit anyone. Aimee smiled and took a deep breath. This would be the last week she’d have this view.

Graduation was in a week, and three weeks after that, she’d be starting the new job she already had lined up. Before she did that, though, she was going to have to do something she’d been thinking about doing for a long time. There was no doubt in her mind now. She had to do it, if she ever wanted to be free from her past. She’d carried this weight around for ten years. That was long enough.

Turning away from the window, Aimee walked over to her neatly made bed. She sat and stared at the bare mattress on the other side of the room.

Aimee’s roommate had finished exams the previous day, and she’d already packed up and gone home. Her boyfriend was back home, so she’d planned to spend the week with him, and then return for commencement. Aimee didn’t have a boyfriend at home—or here at college, for that matter—and she had two more exams still to take. She just hoped she could concentrate well enough not to screw up her grade point average … but Mary Jo might make that impossible.

Mary Jo.

Did anyone else ever think about the frizzy-haired eleven-year-old who’d always thought rules were meant to be broken? Probably not.

Aimee shifted so she could see herself in the full-length mirror beside her dresser. She’d seen photos of herself at eleven years old, and she didn’t think she looked a lot different now. She was small and skinny then, and she was petite and slender now. Obviously, her face looked a little different because now she wore makeup, but the slight slant of her eyes and severe arch of her brows, the upturned nose, and the slightly pouty mouth were the same. In the photos she’d seen of her younger self, Aimee’s long blonde hair had usually been held back in a ponytail or a braid. That was still how she wore her hair.

What would Mary Jo look like now? Would her hair still stick out from her head? Would her smile still be as big?

At first, Aimee liked to tell herself that she never saw Mary Jo again after that day in the Hiding Maze because Mary Jo got mad and ran away. It was a reasonable conclusion. Mary Jo had often threatened to run away, and she’d always had that backpack with her, ready to go.

But years later, when Aimee was being honest with herself, it was pretty clear that Mary Jo hadn’t run anywhere. Aimee’s dream told her that. The reoccurring dream—no, not a dream, her nightmare—had been telling Aimee the truth for ten years.

Aimee pulled away from her reflection and lay back on her bed. She forced herself to travel into the past.

As she had done literally thousands of times now, Aimee tried to convince herself there was no way she could have known something bad would happen to Mary Jo when Aimee left the Hiding Maze. Even though she’d been afraid of the creepy guy, Aimee’s eleven-year-old mind hadn’t really believed he found Mary Jo and hurt her. And since then, she’d tried very hard to believe that Mary Jo was never seen again because of something else, something that had nothing to do with what Aimee did.

But in truth, Aimee knew she was, in part, responsible. Just in part, though. The true culprit was the creep Aimee had seen in the arcade and at the entrance of the Hiding Maze right before she left it.

The evening of the day she’d last seen Mary Jo, Aimee had also seen the creep on TV. He’d been arrested for the attempted kidnapping of some other kid. She didn’t normally pay attention when her parents watched the news, but she’d seen the guy’s face, and she’d heard his name, Emmett Tucker. She’d also heard the word kidnapping. When she’d heard that word, her stomach had turned into a rock that dropped all the way to her feet.

When it was clear Mary Jo had disappeared, Aimee just knew that creep had taken her friend. He’d taken her, and he must have killed her. Apparently, the police were never able to prove that he did, so the guy went to prison just for the attempted kidnapping of the other kid. Aimee took some comfort in that, but not knowing exactly what had happened to Mary Jo ate away at her.

For years after Mary Jo disappeared, Aimee had carried guilt like a backpack even heavier than Mary Jo’s. She’d known the creepy guy was poking around the Hiding Maze, and she’d left her friend there. She was sure Emmett Tucker had taken Mary Jo, and it was Aimee’s fault.

Just a few months after Mary Jo disappeared, Aimee and her family had moved to another state. Long before the time they’d left—actually, just a couple weeks after the last time Aimee saw Mary Jo—the Freddy’s where Aimee and Mary Jo had played in the Hiding Maze had closed. Aimee was never sure why. Her mother thought Freddy’s closed because it was “inherently unsafe” for children; she’d never thought the animatronics were a good idea. Aimee’s mom was very upset that the town they moved to also had a Freddy’s. She didn’t have to worry, though. Aimee never went to it. It reminded her too much of Mary Jo.

But last week, her mom had called her, interrupting the cramming Aimee was doing for her Commercial Transactions class. Stepping out of the library and into the cool night to take her mom’s call, Aimee had looked up at the stars as she’d said with a sigh, “I’m studying, Mom.”

“I know you are, sweetie. But I just wanted to check in on you. How’s it going?”

“Fine, Mom. But I do need to concentrate.”

“I know. I know. I just thought you could take a break and chat for a few minutes.” Aimee’s mom’s smooth and deep voice broke into a chuckle. “You know, a few seconds for your dear old mom.”

Aimee sighed. Through the phone, she could hear footsteps tapping on hardwood floors. She could picture her mom pacing back and forth in the kitchen. That’s what her mom always did when she was chatting on the phone. Aimee could see her mom’s lovely face as if she was right here. Blonde and blue-eyed like Aimee but with more classical features, her mom had large eyes, high cheekbones, and a full mouth.

“Okay, Mom,” Aimee said. “What do you want to chat about? You have two minutes. Go.”

Her mom laughed. “Okay, I’ll start the kitchen timer. Well, let’s see. Your dad has taken up racquetball. It might be too much for him; his shoulders and arms are so sore he can barely lift his coffee cup.”

Aimee smiled.

“Oh, and I saw a blurb on the news about that man we thought took Mary Jo. Remember him?”

Remember him? How could she not? Aimee felt all her muscles contract at once, as they always did whenever she thought about Freddy’s or Emmett Tucker. “What about him?”

“Oh, they let him out of prison. For good behavior, or some such nonsense. He’s back in his home, free as a bird. For some reason, I’ve never forgotten him. Probably because of Mary Jo.”

Aimee felt her stomach flip over and try to crawl up her esophagus. She thought she was going to be sick. Mary Jo’s kidnapper was free?

“Aimee? Are you there?” her mom asked.

Aimee tried to talk, and the words caught in her throat. She swallowed and managed, “Yeah, Mom. Has he talked to the press or anything?”

“What? I have no idea. I just saw a little report about him is all.”

“I have to go, Mom.” Aimee practically threw the words at her mother. And she didn’t wait for a response. She ran inside the library, straight to the bathroom, where she threw up. After sitting in the bathroom stall and crying for half an hour, she’d forced herself not to think about what her mom had told her. She had to study and take an exam.

But of course, she’d thought about it. She’d been thinking about it for a week now.

Even so, she’d made sure it didn’t mess up her studying because before she went back to cramming the night her mom called, she made a decision. As soon as she graduated, she was going to go back to the town where she spent the first eleven years of her life. She was going back, and she was going to find out what Emmett Tucker did with Mary Jo.

Ten years of uncertainty couldn’t turn into fifteen or twenty or more. Aimee could no longer live with the assumption that Mary Jo had been kidnapped by Tucker without proving that he really did kidnap her and finding out what he did to her friend. She needed to know where he put Mary Jo’s body.

Aimee was tired of the nightmares and the horrible visions that played over and over in her head. She was also tired of trying to delude herself with the idea that Mary Jo had run off and was living happily ever after somewhere. She was going to discover and prove the truth once and for all.

---

Aimee remembered her hometown as a pretty little place. Hugging both sides of a river that flowed out of the nearby mountains, the town was the home of a billionaire who had built his corporation’s headquarters here. The headquarters, designed to look like an old-time Western town, sprawled along the river on one end of town. That’s where both Aimee’s parents had worked. When the billionaire had a new complex, with a more modern design, built a few states away (probably so he could have a warmer place to visit in the winter), her parents were transferred. Aimee had never really grown to like the new state. Too hot for her. And she missed snow in the winters.

If it wasn’t for Mary Jo—or actually, the absence of Mary Jo—Aimee would have probably applied for a job at the corporate headquarters here in her old hometown. But she knew she couldn’t handle living in a place that would remind her of her friend every day. Instead, she’d taken a job in a town a couple hundred miles from here. It had the same climate but no painful memories.

Aimee pulled her cute little red hybrid compact into the parking lot of the Riverside Motel just before sunset. When she turned off the engine, she tapped the steering wheel a couple times. Should she go now or wait until tomorrow?

She squinted up beyond the motel’s redwood siding and river rock–covered pillars. A reddish sun was sinking toward the glacier-topped ridge to the west. Almost blood-red rays painted the white expanses. Aimee shivered. Tomorrow. What she needed to do could definitely wait until tomorrow.

Aimee looked away from the sunset. She turned and grabbed a bright-yellow sweater from the back seat. Slipping it on, she picked up her purse and got out of the car.

It took Aimee only minutes to check into the motel and find her room. Once there, she perched atop the beige coverlet on the queen-size bed. She was facing a mirror above the low pine dresser sitting against the exposed-log wall opposite the end of the bed.

“Well, here you are,” she said to herself.

The mirror version of Aimee spoke at the same time she did, of course. Still, she had trouble recognizing herself. She looked older in this mirror, like she was pushing forty instead of barely getting to know twenty-one. Why did her complexion look so gray, her cheeks so gaunt?

Aimee raised a hand to her face and brushed a few strands of hair from her eyes. It felt like a stranger was touching her. How odd.

A tremor skittered down Aimee’s spine, and she looked away from the mirror. She needed sleep was all. She’d studied hard for most of four weeks, and over the last three days, she’d partied just as hard. Aimee didn’t have a ton of friends, but the ones she had were close ones. One of them, Gretta, was Aimee’s closest friend since Mary Jo. She had superwealthy parents and lived in a mansion with a pool, tennis courts, a huge movie room, an equally large game room, and a massive ballroom. After exams were over, Gretta’s parents threw Gretta and her friends a three-day party, complete with live music and food catered by the best chef in town. Gretta and Aimee had spent much of that time alone in the movie room binge-watching old romantic comedies. They both loved the quiet solitude. But they’d balanced it with plenty of swimming, dancing, and eating.

Aimee had been friends with Gretta since she and her parents had moved to the new state. She’d gone to junior high, high school, and college with Gretta.

Gretta was the opposite of Mary Jo, a much better match for Aimee than Mary Jo ever was. When Aimee had met Gretta, she’d realized that her mother’s theory about friendship and balance had been a bunch of crap. Aimee and Mary Jo hadn’t been friends because they balanced each other out. They’d been friends because Aimee had been too shy to tell Mary Jo to go jump in the river. Mary Jo had decided they were best friends, and Aimee had gone along with it. From that point on, everything had been all about Mary Jo. As long as they were together, they were doing what Mary Jo wanted. The only time Aimee had gotten to be herself had been when she was literally by herself.

Gretta had been the person who’d had helped Aimee figure this out. Gretta had just graduated with a BA in psychology, and she was going on to get a master’s next. She wanted to be a therapist. Aimee was one of her unofficial practice patients.

Just the day before, as they’d floated in Gretta’s parents’ infinity pool, looking out over perfectly trimmed expanses of green lawn and pruned bushes, Gretta had said, “You realize that you don’t need to find out exactly what happened to Mary Jo to get closure, right?”

Aimee, who had been sipping lemonade from a huge covered tumbler balanced on her flat belly, shook her head and smacked her lips at the tartness of her drink. “Yes, I do.”

Gretta shook a headful of short curls. A stunning redheaded beauty with flawless pale skin, green eyes, and model-worthy features, Gretta was surprisingly unconcerned about her looks. She rarely wore makeup, and she cut her own hair, despite being able to afford the most expensive hairdresser in town. She wasn’t particularly good at haircutting, so her curls were always asymmetrical.

“No, you don’t,” Gretta said. “The only thing you need to do is forgive yourself. That’s it. Easy-peasy. One step. The end.”

Aimee shook her head, and Gretta splashed water on her. Aimee closed her eyes just in time, and after the water cascaded over her sweaty shoulders and arms, she kept her eyes closed.

With her sight taking a mini-vacation, Aimee’s other senses stepped up. She could smell Gretta’s coconut-scented sunscreen, the lemon in her own lemonade, and the chlorine in the water. She could hear the water, too; it lapped lazily against their floating loungers and splashed against the sides of the pool. From the tennis courts, the thwack of rackets hitting tennis balls drifted over. From even farther away, the soothing sound of horses’ neighs reached Aimee’s ears from the pastures.

Aimee took a deep breath, inhaling all this peacefulness. Then she said, “It’s not as easy as you say it is. Mary Jo is missing because I left her in that game. I didn’t warn her; I didn’t tell an adult. I just left her right where that man could take her.”

Gretta smacked the water with her hand. The sharp sound made Aimee flinch and open her eyes.

“God, you’re so stubborn! How many times do I need to tell you that you don’t know that?” Gretta asked. “You’re not dumb enough to think that. You don’t know what happened after you left. You don’t know what she did after she left the game. Probably, some choice Mary Jo made led to her disappearance. Your choice had nothing to do with it.”

“But Emmett Tucker—” Aimee began.

Gretta held up a hand. “Tucker Shmucker. You don’t know for sure that he took Mary Jo and neither did the police. And if he didn’t take her, then why is Mary Jo’s disappearance your fault? I mean, I get it. You feel like your choice was responsible because it was such a huge deal for you. It’s not Mary Jo’s disappearance that marks that day for you; it’s your standing up for yourself that makes the day so important. That was the first time you defied her, right? That’s what you’ve always told me.”

Aimee nodded.

She and Gretta had been through all this many times, but Gretta was right—Aimee was stubborn. It was hard to disconnect her act of defiance with the end of Mary Jo, and therefore it was hard not to blame herself for Mary Jo’s disappearance.

“But I didn’t really defy her,” Aimee said. “Not directly anyway.”

Gretta opened her mouth, and this time, Aimee held up her hand. “You make it sound like I was making this big self-empowering statement that day I left her in the game, but the truth is, I was just being a scared, petulant child. I mean, if I was going to actually stand up to Mary Jo, I would have told her no. I would have said, ‘I don’t want to play in the Hiding Maze. I’m going home to read.’ I didn’t do that. Instead, I did something that left her vulnerable, and now that Emmett Tucker is out of prison …” She shrugged.

“Because of that, you’re filling your head with horrible images, imagining what he might have done to your friend, and you’re heaping even more guilt on yourself. I know that the way you took your stand with Mary Jo was passive-aggressive, but you need to cut yourself some slack. You were eleven years old. Psychological mastery isn’t a requirement for that age.” Gretta winked at Aimee, and Aimee smiled.

“You’re a good friend,” Aimee said.

“So are you. And you were a good friend to Mary Jo. You owe her nothing.”

Aimee twisted her lips.

Gretta sighed. “But you’re still going back.”

Aimee nodded. “I have to. I really do have to.”

Gretta was quiet for several seconds. Inside the house, the band started playing again. So much for peacefulness. The bass was so strong it vibrated the surface of the water in the pool.

“I could still go with you. I meant it when I said I’d be happy to come,” Gretta shouted over a screeching guitar riff.

“I know. But I need to do this by myself.”

In her motel room, Aimee lay back on her bed as the image of her friend and the relaxing pool faded away. Now that she was here, she was really wishing Gretta had come with her. It would have been so much easier with Gretta along, maybe even fun. They could have turned it into a celebration of everything they had to look forward to in the coming years. They could have …

Aimee frowned and derailed that train of thought. This trip wasn’t about having fun or celebrating. It was about finding out, once and for all, what exactly had happened to Mary Jo.

---

Aimee hadn’t told her parents or Gretta exactly what she was planning to do. Aimee knew they would have tried to talk her out of it. She could just hear her mother telling her how dangerous the idea was.

But Aimee didn’t think it was all that dangerous. Well, maybe a little. But she thought she could handle it.

Sure, when Aimee had been a little girl, Tucker was scary. But now? Aimee was more than capable of handling herself. She was strong and athletic, and she’d taken self-defense classes. Plus, she had both mace and a pretty blue Taser in her purse. And she had her determination. She was going to find out what Tucker did, one way or another.

Besides, Tucker was more than likely a wuss. He took little kids, not adults. He wouldn’t know what to do with someone who could fight back. Or at least that was what Aimee told herself as she headed to Bernadette’s Bakery on Main Street.

Before Aimee came back to face Emmett Tucker, she read the newspaper article about his release. The article had featured a photo of Tucker sitting in front of Bernadette’s Bakery. A little research had revealed that though the bakery served tourists and locals alike, it was a favorite of longtime residents. Hoping Tucker was a regular, Aimee figured the bakery was a good place to start her search for him.

Bernadette’s was one of a couple dozen long-established businesses in the heart of town. The little downtown area was built around a brick-covered square with a stone fountain and a rose garden, and Bernadette’s was the shop closest to the fountain.

Aimee found a parking space two doors down from Bernadette’s and got out of her car. Slipping her long purse strap over her head so the purse hung across her body, she pulled her sweater tight and headed toward Bernadette’s pale-yellow storefront.

Several pigeons strutted back and forth in front of Bernadette’s, snatching pastry crumbs from under the little metal tables on the patio. It was chilly this morning, and only a couple old guys sat at the tables.

When Aimee had arrived in town the previous evening, the sun had been setting in a clear sky. Today, the sun was taking a little vacation. A froth of gray clouds churned above the town like the balloons that had floated on the ceiling of Gretta’s family’s ballroom a couple days before. Those balloons, though, had been purple, not gray. And they’d promised happy times. The clouds overhead didn’t seem to promise anything good. For some reason, Aimee found them ominous.

“Get a grip,” she muttered to herself as she pulled open the bakery’s bright blue door.

Bernadette’s interior, thankfully, was warm, and it smelled of cinnamon, sugar, and coffee. Cramped and cute and frilly, the place didn’t strike Aimee as one that would appeal to the likes of Emmett Tucker. She looked around to see if he was here. He wasn’t, but she figured she might as well hang out a bit and see if he showed up.

The bakery’s half dozen rickety wood tables were occupied mostly by plaid-attired locals, but a few stylishly dressed tourists were in the mix. Every table seat was taken, but a tall counter along one wall had a couple empty stools.

Aimee approached the service counter and waited behind a tall woman ordering three dozen assorted pastries. While she waited, Aimee turned and watched out the window, her muscles tensed, her gaze darting around, scanning the street for Emmett Tucker.

Tucker didn’t show up while Aimee watched, but he did eventually appear.

Aimee had been nursing a small latte and nibbling on a cinnamon roll for ten minutes, wondering if she was wasting her time. Maybe she should have gone to the county records office and tried to find Tucker’s residence.

She was glancing at her watch for the fifth time when Bernadette’s door swung open, and Emmett Tucker walked in.

Aimee knew Emmett Tucker had been in his early forties when he was arrested. He’d looked much older than that, but several things had contributed to the wrinkles that had cinched up his face. He’d apparently spent most of his adult life working outside, on construction sites, and he also was a chain-smoker. Aimee figured he probably ate junk food, too. He didn’t look like someone who bought organic vegetables.

Now with his long hair gone, replaced by a buzz cut, Tucker was barely recognizable as the man he’d been when Aimee had seen him at Freddy’s and on the news. But she knew him. Those eyes and those yellowed teeth were unmistakable. Sometime in the last ten years, Tucker had picked up a scar that bisected his left cheek, and he’d lost a few of his teeth.

No one greeted Tucker when he came into the bakery. The tourists didn’t give him a glance. The locals flicked looks at him, but they quickly returned their attention to their coffee and rolls.

Tucker didn’t seem to care one way or another about who was paying attention to him. He just ordered his coffee and cinnamon roll and headed back outside. Aimee half rose off her stool when he went out the door, but she sat down when Tucker settled himself at an outside table and proceeded to drink his coffee and eat his cinnamon roll as if it was a warm sunny day.

For twenty minutes, Aimee tapped her foot and sipped at the dregs of her cooling latte. Should she confront him now? That would probably be smart. But then again, maybe if she just followed him, she’d learn something about him that would make a confrontation unnecessary. She gritted her teeth. She should wait.

When Tucker finally rose from his table, Aimee stood and dropped her Styrofoam cup and paper plate in a trash bin by the door as she watched Tucker head north up the street. Before he could get out of sight, she exited the bakery and lingered by its tables as she watched Tucker angle off the sidewalk toward the driver’s side of a faded old green van.

A van. That was suspicious. Didn’t kidnappers use vans?

Aimee trotted quickly to her car and got in just as Tucker backed the van out of the angled parking spot in front of an art gallery. She quickly started her car and pulled out to follow him.

For the next hour, Aimee tailed Tucker to a pharmacy, where he picked up a prescription; to a gas station, where he put gas in the van; and finally to a grocery store, where he filled a cart with frozen dinners, chips, canned soup, cereal, and a gallon of milk. She was right about his lack of interest in organic vegetables; he didn’t go anywhere near the produce aisle, period.

Aimee’s heart rate had been fast and uneven when she’d started stalking her quarry, but by the time she got to the grocery store, it had settled down. It turned out that stalking wasn’t all that interesting … at least not when your target was doing mundane things. It wasn’t hard, either. At first, Aimee had been furtive. At the pharmacy, she’d hidden behind a display of sunglasses, and she’d even pretended to try on a few pairs so she’d have a “disguise.” At the gas station, she’d pulled her car in behind a dumpster and gotten out to peer over the top of it while Tucker had pumped his gas.

In the grocery store, at first, she hid behind product displays at the ends of the aisles, but when it became obvious that Tucker was oblivious to his surroundings, she gave up the subterfuge and just followed him around. She did have a cart so she looked like a normal shopper, and she threw a little of this and a little of that in the cart, but she shouldn’t have bothered. He never even looked her way.

After Tucker got back in his van in the grocery store parking lot, he headed out of town and turned onto a narrow rural road. She let a car get between her and Tucker just in case he’d noticed her—not that she thought he would; the town was filled with small hybrids similar to hers.

As she drove, Aimee kept her gaze on the roof of the van up ahead of her. It trundled along at a sedate pace, so it was easy to keep up.

At one point, a loud caw startled her, and she flinched when a crow swooped low across the hood of her car, barely avoiding her windshield. Rattled for reasons she didn’t understand, she watched the crow fly up over a dormant cornfield.

Going this slowly, Aimee had plenty of time to survey her surroundings. The rural road was winding through the flatlands stretching out from the south side of town to the foothills of the distant mountains. A lot of this area was farmland, but she remembered there were a couple parks out this way, farther down the road. Along this stretch of the narrow, uneven road, though, neither farms nor parks were visible. Instead, dilapidated old mobile homes and deteriorating cottages with roofs succumbing to thick moss were surrounded by old cars up on cinder blocks and discarded furniture. Aimee spotted several broken trampolines, multiple rusting swings, and dozens of scattered toys left out in scruffy yards to be baked by the sun and drowned in the rain.

After about five minutes, Tucker’s van slowed, and Tucker turned left next to a dented mailbox on a slanted wood post. Dust billowed up from the van’s tires as he headed down a dirt driveway.

Aimee slowed and looked past the van. The driveway appeared to stop in front of an old mobile home. This must be where Tucker lived.

Aimee drove past the driveway and pulled off the road a couple hundred yards farther on. She parked on the road’s gravel shoulder and looked back over her shoulder.

Yep. Sure enough. Tucker was unloading his groceries and heading toward the mobile home’s front door.

Aimee slapped her hand on her steering wheel in celebration. This was her chance. She could finally confront him!

A tiny flutter in Aimee’s belly might have been suggesting she was doing something that wasn’t all that smart, but she ignored it. She didn’t care about being smart right now. She cared about finding out what Emmett Tucker had done with Mary Jo.

Aimee did a tight U-turn on the narrow road. Returning to Tucker’s driveway, she turned onto it.

Aimee’s little car bumped through a pothole. She clenched her teeth and slowed the car to a crawl.

Peering through her now-dusty windshield, Aimee looked at her destination. A chill sluiced through her.

Maybe this wasn’t such a great idea.

Emmett Tucker’s home looked like it wasn’t a fit place for rats, much less humans. Sitting in the middle of a small rectangle of bare dirt relieved only by the occasional wilted weed, the single-wide was either painted dark brown or it was so dirty it had become dark brown over time, and its windows were so caked with dust, they were barely recognizable as windows. Two of them were boarded over. The flashing around the base of the mobile home had long since torn away, and the rusted wheels of the home’s undercarriage could be seen balancing on crumbling cinder blocks.

Reaching the barren earth in front of Tucker’s home, Aimee did another U-turn and parked her car with its front end pointed toward the road. She wanted to be in position for a quick getaway if need be.

Glancing in her rearview mirror to see if Tucker had come back outside (he hadn’t), Aimee grabbed her purse and got out of the car before she could change her mind.

Looking up at the dark sky, she slung her purse across her body. She unsnapped the purse and kept her hand inside, tightly grasping her Taser. Then she pointed herself toward Tucker’s front door and marched over to it with her chin lifted and her shoulders set.

She was just stepping up onto the rotting porch when the black-painted front door swung open. She stuttered to a stop and forced herself not to backpedal. She looked into the eyes of the man she’d seen in Freddy’s ten years before.

“Whatever you’re sellin’, I’m not buyin’,” Emmett Tucker said. Up close, he looked even worse than he had in the bakery. His skin was so thin you could see his veins crawling under the surface.

Aimee didn’t want to be here any longer than she had to be, so she got right to the point. Clutching her mace and planting her feet, she recited her prepared lines.

“Ten years ago, my friend Mary Jo and I saw you at Freddy’s. That was the same day you were arrested. It was also the same day Mary Jo disappeared. I want to know what you did with her.”

Tucker blinked once and leaned against the doorjamb. Slowly, he reached into the sagging pocket of his baggy jeans. Aimee stiffened and tightened her grip on the Taser.

Tucker pulled out a pack of chewing gum and methodically unwrapped a piece. Folding it into his mouth, he tossed the wrapper onto the porch. “I quit smoking,” he said.

“Good for you,” Aimee said without thinking.

Tucker leaned back and gestured toward the interior of the mobile home. “Wanna come in?”

Aimee bit back her “Hell no,” and said politely, “No thank you. I’m fine out here.” She swallowed. “I realize you probably won’t answer my question. Why should you? You never admitted to anything before. But I had to come and ask. I had to.”

For several seconds, Tucker chewed his gum loudly. The sucking and smacking sounds made Aimee’s skin crawl.

Then Tucker took a step forward. Aimee backed away quickly.

Tucker chuckled at her, then gestured at the porch step. “I tell you what. You sit here with me, all neighborly like, for a spell, and I’ll answer your question.”

Aimee frowned and looked at the porch. She glanced back up and saw that Tucker’s gaze had dropped from her face to her fitted scoop-neck pale blue top and on down to her tight navy-blue pencil pants.

Aimee kept her expression neutral. She didn’t like being stared at … by anyone. She didn’t like it, but she’d learned to ignore it. She wasn’t going to let Tucker intimidate her. She looked down at the porch again. She realized she was inspecting it for some kind of hidden trap. Why did he want her to sit with him?

She shrugged. Okay. If that was what it was going to take.

“You first,” Aimee said, gesturing at the step.

Tucker chuckled again and sank down onto the splintered wood planks. Aimee followed suit, positioning herself out of his reach. She kept her grip on the Taser.

For several seconds, they sat in silence. In the distance, a dog barked once. A truck rumbled past on the road. The breeze picked up, and the sky seemed to lower even more.

“Well?” Aimee said.

Tucker turned to look at her. “I remember you. You and that girl everyone thought I took were in Freddy’s that day.”

Aimee forced herself not to shiver.

Tucker cocked his head. “You were the one I saw in that tunnel thing when I was looking for my daughter.”

Aimee could feel her pulse throbbing, double-time, at her temples. She kept her breathing even.

Tucker shrugged. “That’s why I was there that day. I was looking for Jilly, my daughter. She always liked going to that place.”

He turned abruptly and shifted closer to Aimee. She pulled her mace halfway out of her purse, but she didn’t lean back. Instead, she looked directly into Tucker’s eyes. “And where did you take my friend?”

Tucker chewed his gum and held Aimee’s gaze for several seconds. Then he shook his head. “I never took any kid. All’s I was trying to do when I got arrested was get my own kid back from that lying tramp I married. So what if she got custody? Why does a court get to decide who gets custody of a man’s daughter? That judge had no business giving my girl to my ex. It was my right to have my own kid. I was just standing up for my rights! I never shoulda been sent to prison for that!” Tucker pounded his fist on the porch, and Aimee jumped up.

“You’re lying!”

Tucker scowled at her. “Who the hell are you coming to my home and telling me I’m lying?”

He stood, and Aimee took a step back.

“Get out of here!” he shouted at her. “I’ve had enough of folks thinking I did stuff I didn’t do!”

“Tell the truth!” Aimee yelled. “You took Mary Jo. I know you did! She yelled at you, and so you took her! You took her, and you killed her!”

Tucker’s face flushed red. “Why the hell would I care if some little snot kid yelled at me? I didn’t take your stupid friend! And I ain’t never killed anyone!”

Aimee pulled out her Taser and aimed it at Tucker’s chest. “Tell me the truth, or I’ll tase you!” All the anger and frustration and guilt she’d hung on to for ten years came out in the screeched words and spittle that flew from her mouth.

Tucker jerked forward and reached for the Taser. Aimee didn’t hesitate. She pressed the button.

Tucker whipped his body away so the Taser missed him. When it did, he started cussing. “What the hell’s wrong with you?” he bellowed. He swung out at her.

Aimee zigged away from his blow and then stepped in before he could swing again. Furious, she kicked him in the shin.

“Ow!” Tucker glared at Aimee, bent over, and charged at her.

Feeling pleased with herself for hurting Tucker, Aimee wasn’t ready for Tucker’s move. She tried to avoid him, but he grabbed her. She screamed and attempted to slip a hand into her purse to get her mace. But Tucker had her in a bear hug, and he tightened it. Then he lifted her off the ground.

“Crazy girl!” he growled at her as he backed toward his open front door.

“Let me go!” Aimee spewed as she flailed in Tucker’s grip. She tried to remember her self-defense moves. What was she supposed to do when someone held her tight like this?

Her heart pounding, sweat trickling down her spine, Aimee remembered. She threw her head up, trying to whack Tucker’s chin.

All she did was whap her forehead into his chest. She was too short to do him any harm that way.

By this time, Tucker was carrying her inside his dingy home, and Aimee’s fury was turning into fear. She writhed this way and that, but she couldn’t break lose. So, she started to scream.

“Shut the hell up!” Tucker shouted. He carried her past a filthy kitchenette and into a tight dark hallway that smelled like dirty laundry and cooked sausages.

Aimee picked up her feet and tried to kick at the walls, but the space was too cramped. She screamed again, and Tucker kicked a small door open and tossed her through the opening. Aimee’s hip hit the corner of a miniature bathroom cabinet, and her head flew forward and hit a small mirror. Wincing, she struggled for her balance and turned to face Tucker … just as he slammed the door.

“I’m calling the police!” Tucker yelled through the cheap wood.

“Good!” Aimee yelled back. “You should be in prison!”

“I’m not the one going to prison,” Tucker shouted. “You assaulted me!”

Aimee opened her mouth to yell a response, but then she realized he was right. But it was self-defense, wasn’t it? Of course it was. She’d tased him because he’d reached out at her.

Reached out. Okay, so maybe that wasn’t enough for her to claim self-defense.

But he was a kidnapper!

Yeah. Of kids.

Aimee rubbed her sore hip and tried to steady her breathing. It refused to steady. She was taking heaving gulps of air. Through the door, she could hear Tucker talking on the phone. She caught the words crazy girl and assault.

She shook her head and frowned. She couldn’t let the police get involved in this. They might arrest her. And even if they didn’t, she’d waste all kinds of time trying to get it all straightened out. No. She had to get out of here.

Aimee reached out and tried the doorknob. Locked. Not a surprise. She thought about throwing herself at the door, but she quickly dismissed that idea and turned to look at the room.

She was in a minuscule bathroom, a very disgusting bathroom with toothpaste drying on the sides of the sink, a brown ring around the grayish tub, and stains she didn’t want to think about on the floor around the toilet. But the bathroom did have a window above the toilet. It was small, but so was she.

Cringing, Aimee gingerly put the toilet lid down and climbed onto it. Unlatching the window, she shoved it open and levered herself up onto its narrow ledge. She stuck her head through the opening and pushed off the toilet lid.

The window’s metal sides scraped at her shoulders as she squirmed forward. She heard her sweater snag and rip, but she kept going. She pushed through and looked down. A dead bush squatted under the window. She figured it would break her fall, so she slithered farther and let herself drop to the ground.

The bush did break her fall, but it also scraped her hands and arms. It hurt, but Aimee kept her teeth clamped together. Breathing hard, she glanced up at the window to be sure Tucker wasn’t coming after her, and then she tore around to the front of his mobile home.

As she did, she heard a siren in the distance. She ran faster.

Jumping into her car, Aimee had the engine started when she saw, in her rearview mirror, Tucker barreling out of his mobile home. She quickly put the car in gear, and it shot down his bumpy dirt driveway.

---

Aimee passed a police cruiser just a few hundred yards after she got back onto the road. She made sure she drove sedately and looked innocent as it went past. Once it did, she sped up.

Her hands and arms stinging from the scratches the bush gave her, her hip and head sore from being tossed into the bathroom, Aimee was literally shaking. She felt beat up and freaked out. Whether she was shaking in pain, anger, or relief she didn’t know. She made herself take long, even breaths as she kept glancing in her rearview mirror to be sure no one was pursuing her.

Aimee ground her teeth. She slapped her hand on the steering wheel, not in celebration this time. She fisted her hand and pounded on the steering wheel in frustration.

How had this gotten so turned around? Tucker was the criminal. Not her!

Tucker was more than likely giving the police Aimee’s description and a description of her car right now. She should probably get out of town.

The thick gray clouds that had been hovering so low all morning finally gave up trying to hang on to their moisture. Fat raindrops smacked at Aimee’s windshield.

But was that it? Would she never find out what had happened to Mary Jo?

Aimee realized she was feeling more than beat-up and freaked out. She was devastated.

“What were you expecting?” she asked.

Had she thought Tucker would admit to taking Mary Jo and tell her he would have taken Mary Jo no matter what Aimee had done? Had she thought she was going to get a big old “It wasn’t your fault” speech from the man?

She realized she wasn’t sure what she’d expected from her conversation with Emmett Tucker. But now … well, now she was left with even more questions than she’d lived with for ten years. If he wouldn’t admit to what he did, how was she going to find out what had happened to Mary Jo?

“Seriously, how do I prove what he did?” Aimee asked the heavier rain, now streaking across the glass in front of her.

Should she just leave? Should she do what Gretta was always saying—go into therapy, learn to forgive herself, and forget about Mary Jo?

Aimee shook her head. She couldn’t do that. Any of it. She didn’t want to go into therapy. She didn’t want to leave without finding out something. And she couldn’t forget Mary Jo. Ever. Mary Jo deserved to be remembered.

So, what other options did she have?

Aimee looked past the rain to the town ahead. The answers to her questions had to be here someplace.

The rain picked up even more. Aimee reached out and turned up the speed of her windshield wipers. The swish-thunk-swish-thunk rhythm of their swipes across the glass was strangely comforting.

“I can do this,” she said, pressing harder on the accelerator and concentrating on her slow breathing. She was going to figure out once and for all what happened to Mary Jo.

And she knew just where to go next. She was going to do what all detectives did: return to the scene of the crime.

---

Aimee kept breathing slowly and deeply until she pulled into Freddy’s crowded parking lot and …

Hang on a second.

Aimee frowned at the sprawling two-story building at the edge of the lot. It was in the right place. But that was about it. This wasn’t Freddy’s.

Aimee glared at the massive building that appeared to have eaten Freddy’s, and as she looked at it, she realized it was Freddy’s. It was just an abominable version of Freddy’s. The old pizzeria had been built over and around, bloating it into what looked like a kitschy tourist trap.

With two stories instead of Freddy’s one, this restaurant looked to be entirely new. It was rustic in appearance, but that was a facade. Its faux-old-timey siding looked too pristine and clean to have been around for long.

Aimee ducked her head to look out and up through her windshield at a big wood sign supported by a couple of tall, thick logs. Burned into the blond wood, black letters spelled out the name of the restaurant now occupying Freddy’s old building: FLO’S FABULOUS EATERY. Under the sign, a smaller dark green sign with white lettering read, HOME OF THE LEANING TOWER OF PANCAKES. COME ON IN, AND SIT A SPELL.

A car engine revved nearby, and Aimee was jolted back to the present. She sank low in her seat. Had the cops found her?

Behind her, a big black truck backed into a nearby parking slot. She blew out her pent-up air, slid forward in her seat, and checked her appearance in the mirror on her visor.

Amazingly, she didn’t look like she’d just been in a confrontation. Her hair was mussed, but it went back into place when she finger-combed it. Her face looked fine. The backs of her hands were scratched, and there was a little blood on the sleeve of her torn sweater, but it wasn’t all that noticeable. She’d pass inspection if no one looked at her closely.

Aimee flipped up her visor. She’d better get inside and look around before she was spotted.

---

Checking over her shoulder for the third time since she left her car, Aimee stepped into the lobby of Flo’s Fabulous Eatery. It was just after noon, which explained why the clatter of utensils and buzz of conversation coming from the restaurant’s dining room was loud.

Aimee nearly jumped out of her shoes when she was greeted by an effervescent woman about her own age. “Welcome to Flo’s Fabulous Eatery!” the woman said. “Did you bring your hunger with you?”

Aimee tensed, and then, forgetting her predicament for a second, she blinked and stared at the woman who’d spoken to her.

The woman laughed. “This must be your first time here. I know. I look ridiculous. Flo isn’t a person. She’s a cow.” She pointed. Aimee turned and widened her eyes at a life-size sculpture of a Holstein cow. It was right inside the restaurant doorway, but Aimee had missed it because she’d been focused on what she was here for.

Aimee turned back to the hostess and gestured at the black-and-white cow costume the woman wore. She focused on keeping her tone light and innocent. She was just a diner here for a meal. She was not a fugitive investigating a disappearance. “Well”—she read the woman’s name tag—“Kim, you make Holstein look good.”

Kim—olive-skinned with big brown eyes and wavy brown hair—did actually look kind of cute in the costume. It helped that she had a dimpled smile. She wasn’t taking herself too seriously. “Thanks!” she said. “You’re very nice.” She picked up a menu and turned toward the dining room.

Aimee hesitated, looking around to check if anyone was observing her. No one was. She glanced at the decor.

Aimee had hoped that once she was inside the restaurant, she would see something familiar. But nothing was as she remembered it.

Freddy’s lobby had been large but mostly empty, just lined with red benches to sit on when you had to wait for a table. An archway had separated the lobby from the huge dining room. From that archway, you could see the stage and the animatronics.

Flo’s lobby was even bigger than Freddy’s had been, and it was filled with furniture, set up to look like a sitting room in a nineteenth-century home. It held at least a dozen overstuffed settees, ottomans, and chairs. Instead of an archway leading into the dining room beyond, what looked like the gates to a pasture separated the waiting area from the eating area.

Even from here, through the slats of the “gates,” Aimee could see that the dining room was totally different than it had been when the building had been a Freddy’s. For one thing, the stage where the animatronics used to perform—which should have been on the far side of the dining room—was gone. For another thing, the black-and-white tile floor had been replaced with a bright-green linoleum floor. She thought that was weird—the black-and-white floor would have fit right in with the Holstein cow theme. But maybe the green floor was supposed to be grass or something. It probably was, given that Freddy’s red-painted walls had been covered over by murals depicting farmland and meadows filled with wildflowers.

Aimee flashed back to entering Freddy’s when she was a kid. Besides the floor and the stage and the animatronics, the other thing she’d always noticed first was the carnival-like music and bells and jingles of the arcade games—that and kids screaming and laughing and running all over the place. Flo’s had nothing like that. All Aimee could hear now was classic country music playing from speakers overhead and the normal clinks and clatters and chatter of families dining. She did hear a few kids giggling, but she didn’t see them.

“I know the place is a little cliché,” Kim said, “but the food’s really good.”

Aimee stiffened and looked at Kim. “What?”

Behind her, the restaurant’s door opened. She glanced toward it, holding her breath. But it was just an older couple wearing matching pastel jackets. Not the police.

Kim smiled. “I was telling you the food’s good, in spite of how the place looks.” She gestured at the lobby. “The owners were farmers before they bought this place, and they’re really into cows—their history and such.”

Aimee nodded, her lips pressed together. She wished she could just slip away and poke around, but Kim said, “Follow me.”

Aimee had little choice but to comply. Still on edge, she trailed Kim through the fake gate and on into the packed dining room. Aimee was still looking for evidence of the old Freddy’s. Maybe the booths? She looked around. Nope. Flo’s did have booths, but they weren’t red like the ones in Freddy’s. They were brown vinyl, made to look like branded leather. The dividers between the booths were different, too—they were made of reclaimed barn wood that stretched nearly to the ceiling.

Kim led Aimee to a booth at the far-left side of the dining room, in the area that used to be Freddy’s arcade. Aimee took a seat and tried to remember what had been in this spot ten years before. Maybe the air hockey table? Or had it been a pinball machine?

Aimee accepted a menu, encased in heavy faux leather, from Kim.

“Your server will be Mary. She’ll be with you in a minute. Enjoy your meal.”

Aimee barely managed a nod and a smile because when Kim had said, “Mary,” a chill had rushed through Aimee’s body. It was so intense that she had to clench her teeth to keep them from chattering.

Mary. What were the odds of being served by someone with a name similar to Mary Jo’s?

“Probably not that huge,” Aimee whispered to herself. It’s just a coincidence, she thought.

“Hi, I’m Mary,” a middle-aged woman with died spiky red hair and too much makeup said. “How are you doing today?”

“Oh, you’re not a cow,” Aimee said. As soon as she said the words, she realized how they’d sounded, and she flushed. “I mean …”

Mary barked out a deep, rough laugh. “That depends on who you talk to.” She laughed harder.

“I’m sorry,” Aimee said, putting a cool hand to one of her hot cheeks. She really needed to calm herself and focus. “I was referring to—”

“The costume. I know.” Mary looked down at her Holstein-patterned apron, which she wore over black pants and a black blouse. “Servers get away with just this.” She gestured at it. “When the place first opened, they apparently tried to put the servers in the cow costumes, but being a hostess in that getup is totally different than trying to wait tables in it. They figured that out quick.”

Aimee nodded.

“So, what can I get you to drink, sweetie?”

“A cola? Whatever you have.”

“One cola coming up. I’ll give you some time to look at the menu.”

“I also need to use the restroom,” Aimee said. She didn’t, but she wanted a chance to poke around. “I, um, may need several minutes.”

“No problem.”

“Thanks.”

“The restrooms are through that door,” Mary said. She pointed toward what used to be the back of the arcade area at Freddy’s.

“Thanks.”

As soon as Mary walked away, Aimee slipped out of the booth. She still had her bloody, torn sweater on, and she still had her purse slung across her body. She wasn’t sure if she actually was going to stay to drink the soda she’d just ordered. It depended on what she found when she went looking.

Standing and checking to see if anyone was watching her (no one was), Aimee walked quickly past a back exit from the restaurant, on toward the hallway leading to the restrooms. She idly noticed that a cobweb blew out from a vent at the base of the wall on the left side. Passing its dancing filaments, she entered the hall. Once there, she bypassed the doors marked LADIES and GENTS. She didn’t think there would be anything to find in new bathrooms. But there was a door marked MAINTENANCE at the back of the hall that was promising; it was in the area where the entrance to the Hiding Maze used to be. If there was anything left to indicate what had happened to Mary Jo, it would be there.

Or at least, that was Aimee’s theory.

Not that she was too excited about her theory.

Ever since she’d entered Flo’s Fabulous Eatery, her enthusiasm for her return to the crime scene plan had waned … a lot. She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting. Obviously if the restaurant looked totally different on the outside, it would be totally different on the inside, too. Had Aimee really thought she was going to find a clue in a place that had been completely and totally remodeled?

“Just get on with it,” Aimee told herself. She was here; she might as well poke around.

Checking over her shoulder to be sure she was still alone, Aimee hurried to the end of the hall and put her hand on the knob of the door marked MAINTENANCE. Would it be locked?

She turned the knob. Not locked. The door opened right up. Looking behind her one more time, Aimee slipped into the dark room and pulled the door closed before she started feeling the wall for a light switch.

The room smelled of musty cardboard, bleach, and lemon-scented cleaners, and it felt chilly and damp. The closed door muted the sounds coming from the dining area, so it was nearly silent in the room. The only thing Aimee could hear clearly was the sound of her own rapid breathing.

After several seconds, Aimee still hadn’t found the light switch. In those seconds, her imagination had conjured up all sorts of things that could have been skulking in the dark, waiting to leap out at her before she got the light on.

After Aimee and her parents had moved to their new home, all of Aimee’s new friends had loved horror movies and ghost stories. In the summer, her parents sent her to camp, and one of the favorite activities there was hanging around a bonfire in the dark listening to scary stories. Aimee had hated those stories. To fit in, she’d sat there with her friends, but she’d done her best not to listen. Instead, she’d hummed in her head. When Gretta and her other friends dragged her to horror movies, she’d sat with her eyes closed … and hummed in her head.

She was humming in her head now as she began scrabbling frantically for the light. She’d been in the unlit space long enough. She felt prickles between her shoulder blades, as if her body could sense the spot where a hidden person wanted to plunge a knife.

“Where is the light switch?” Aimee hissed as she kept pawing at the wall on either side of the door.

She was about to give up and go back out into the hallway when she heard footsteps entering the hallway outside the door. She froze. Was she about to get caught?

Backing away from the door, Aimee tried to think of what she’d say if someone found her in here. Nothing besides “I was looking for the restroom” came to mind, and that excuse would only work if she could convince whoever found her that she was blind. Only a person who couldn’t see could miss the oversize, cow-themed signs to the restrooms.

The footsteps in the hallway quieted, then stopped. The person must have gone into one of the restrooms.

Aimee exhaled the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. She stepped back to the door, which she could locate because of the light coming in underneath it.

She realized her eyes were adjusting to the dark. Whereas the room had seemed to be nothing but solid inky blackness moments before, now she could discern hulking shapes on either side of the door. She could also see what appeared to be a cord dangling down next to the door’s trim. She reached out and pulled on it, hoping she wasn’t yanking on something that would set off an alarm.

As soon as Aimee pulled the cord, the room was flooded with bright white light from a bank of fluorescent bulbs overhead. She immediately whirled in a circle to be sure that she’d imagined sharing the space with someone else. She had. She was alone.

The small room looked to be a combination of janitor’s closet and storage closet. It had the same green flooring as the rest of the restaurant, and the walls were painted sky blue. A bucket and a mop sat in one corner, along with several brooms and dusters. Next to these, a shelf of cleaning supplies extended from the floor to the low ceiling. Next to that, another shelf full of paper products—paper towels, napkins, toilet paper—extended to the back wall.

Aimee looked at that far wall. It was partially obscured by a stack of boxes, but over the top of the boxes, Aimee could see what looked like the upper edge of a dusty vent cover. And above the vent cover, she thought she saw some faded orange and red paint. Was that part of the rainbow?

Her heart stuttered in her chest. Could it be? Was the Hiding Maze really still here?

Aimee quickly stepped forward and tried to shove aside the stack of boxes. It was too heavy to shove. Frowning, she pushed at the top box, which was above her head.

It wasn’t too heavy on its own, so she lifted it up and set it aside. The one below it was even lighter. She moved it, too. She shifted one more box, leaving the two bottom ones.

Now that she’d moved the top boxes, she could see that she’d definitely found the entrance of the Hiding Maze game. The grate was dirty, and it looked a little rusty, but it was the right size and shape, and it was surrounded by the red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet of the old rainbow.

Aimee was surprised the new owners had left the grate and the rainbow. But then, the rainbow fit with the countryside theme of the place. They must have figured it went with the sky-blue paint. Or maybe they’d kept it as some kind of homage to the old pizzeria. She’d learned from watching her parents redo two old houses that if you didn’t have to fix something, it saved money to leave it. Why move an old grate and paint over a rainbow in what was going to be a storage room?

The bottom two boxes were the heaviest ones, but now that she’d moved the others, Aimee could shove aside the remaining ones. She pushed them just far enough to clear a path.

Stepping up to the grate, Aimee grabbed its edge and pulled. It didn’t move. She frowned. It hadn’t been nailed shut or anything, had it?

She ran her fingers around the edges of the grate. No. It didn’t feel like anything was holding it closed.

The sound of footsteps came from the hall again. They sounded different from the last footfalls Aimee had heard. These were heavier, slower. But they were coming closer.

Not willing to be caught now that she was so close to being able to investigate what she came here to see, Aimee quickly pulled back the boxes that had been blocking the grate. Positioning them just far enough from the grate to give her room to maneuver but close to where they had been when she’d come in here, she hustled to restack the other three boxes. She’d just put the last one on top when the door to the room opened.

Tucked behind the stack she’d just rebuilt in the nick of time, Aimee held her breath, this time on purpose. She listened as someone stomped into the room. She heard a soft shuffling sound and a heavy sigh, and then someone muttered, “And they yell at me for leaving the light on. Why should I turn it off if no one else will?”

More footsteps, moving away. The door closed.

Aimee took a deep breath and turned back to the grate. Maybe the rust on the grate was acting as a glue, holding the grate tight to the wall. Aimee frowned and tried tugging again.

She needed to hurry. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been back here. Two minutes? Five minutes? More than that? How long would it take before someone came looking for her?

Aimee could feel tension pulling up her shoulders. Her neck felt stiff.

She stepped back from the grate and rolled her head in a circle. That brought a little clarity.

“Dummy,” she said as she zipped open her purse.

Reaching into the small pouch, she pulled out a metal nail file. She may not have carried much in her purse, but she had the essentials.

She poked the end of the nail file between the wall and the rusty edge of the grate, and she worked it back and forth all along the top and part of the side. After just a minute or so, she felt something give.

Encouraged, she ran the file farther down the edge of the vent, continuing to jiggle the grate with her other hand. It took another several seconds, but suddenly, the grate came away from the wall.

Aimee pulled it back fully. Holding it open, she ducked down to peer in through the opening.

The storage room’s bright light landed on what Aimee had been hoping she’d find: the entrance room to the Hiding Maze game. It was still there.

Stretching out from the vent opening, the game tunnel disappeared into gloom, but the part Aimee could see was lined with fake trees and boulders and little wood cubbyhole doors. The doors looked like they were fuzzy with dust, as was the tunnel floor, but everything appeared to be intact.

It was obvious no one had been in the tunnel in years. A lot of years. Ten years, to be exact.

It wasn’t just the thick dust that made that clear. Just a few feet inside the tunnel, the same sock Aimee had seen the last time she’d been here, lay crumpled. It had to be the same sock because it had a distinctive, multicolored stripe and a hole in the toe. Aimee looked beyond the sock, and spotted all the other debris she remembered from her last time in the game: the deflated balloon, the piles of confetti, and the broken red plastic fork.

Aimee felt her pulse quicken. Maybe no one had been in the game since it was last played. If that was so, she actually had a good chance of finding the clues she was looking for!

Aimee dropped down onto her hands and knees and crawled into the game entrance room. As soon as she was in it, the vent cover dropped into place behind her. Immediately, Aimee noticed that the dining room sounds were even more muffled. She could barely hear anything at all from the restaurant’s eating area—just the occasional laughter, which sounded like it was miles away. She suddenly felt very, very alone.

“Calm down,” she told herself. She turned around and sat cross-legged in front of the game console.

Whenever she’d used the console as a kid, it was always lit up. Now it was dark. Dark and dirty. It was covered with dust.

Aimee reached out and pressed a button at random, hoping it would light up if she did. For a few seconds, the console stayed dormant. But then, suddenly, the old Freddy voice Aimee remembered said, “Welcome to Freddy’s Hiding Maze Hide-and-Seek Game. Please wait. A game is currently in progress.”

Aimee turned away from the console. She started crawling down the tunnel.

As soon as Aimee started moving, dust wafted up around her. She sneezed, and her eyes started to itch. Resisting the urge to rub them, she kept going.

The old tree bark, hanging branches, and moss crumbled around her as they hit her. They were brittle with age.

Aimee was thankful that whoever had come into the maintenance closet had defied the rules and left the light on. The light was strong enough to illuminate most of the main tunnel. She could even see traces of the old chocolate frosting stains on one of the boulders.

She wasn’t sure how well she was going to see after she turned off the main tunnel, but Aimee wasn’t too concerned about that. If she had to go back into the restaurant, eat a meal, leave to get a flashlight, and come back later, she would … as long as she could avoid being spotted by the police. But she couldn’t leave now without at least doing an initial search for some sign of what had happened to Mary Jo.

Aimee took her time crawling down the tunnel because she was scrutinizing every inch of it. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for. Signs of a struggle? Blood? A plea for help scratched into the tunnel walls? She’d thought about those kinds of clues whenever she’d thought about coming back to find Mary Jo. There had to be something. Tucker must have left behind something to prove he’d gotten into the game to take Mary Jo.

At the end of the first leg of the tunnel, where she’d be out of light if she kept going to the right or to the left, Aimee glanced at the other game console. This one was dusty, too, but it wasn’t totally dark. Instead of a blank display like the one at the entrance had, this one could be read.

Aimee peered at it. Was that …?

She crawled closer and rubbed her finger over the console’s name display. She gasped. The breathy sound bounced around her, then faded away as she stared at the display.

The console panel still listed her and Mary Jo as the active players!

They were the last ones to play the game?

She hadn’t known that.

Hoping that the game console and tunnel lights would come on, Aimee hit the RESET button on the console.

It worked! The console’s display lit up. It was flashing FAILURE, but so what? What mattered was that the rope lights that lined the tunnels and surrounded the cubbyhole doors lit up.

Aimee grinned. “Yes!”

This would make her investigation easier. She started to turn away from the console so she could get on with it.

The rain forest soundtrack started playing, and Aimee shivered. Hearing the old rain sounds and screeches creeped her out.

She shook herself like a dog. She was being silly.

Aimee crawled away from the console and started to pass a closed cubbyhole. As she did, the slithery edges of a dark and horrifying suspicion started seeping into her consciousness. She pulled her head out of the cubbyhole and looked back at the game console, which was still flashing FAILURE.

Aimee plummeted from the sunny heights of the exultation she’d felt moments before into a low, slimy bog of dread. She turned and looked left and right down the tunnels that extended from the entry tunnel. Her gaze flitted frantically from one cubbyhole door to the next.

Her head pounding, Aimee turned right out of the main tunnel and started crawling faster, her gaze flitting frantically around her as she went. In spite of the chill in the tunnels, Aimee was sweating. She was also breathing hard. Her inhales and exhales were so loud that they echoed off the walls of the crawl spaces; it sounded like a pack of panting dogs was pursuing her.

After just a few minutes of crawling at a breakneck pace up and down through the tunnels and this way and that through the game’s nooks and crannies, Aimee’s knees began to protest what she was doing. Not used to repeated impacts on a hard surface, they began to pulse with burning pain. Her neck ached, too, because of the strained position she was keeping it in to look into each cubbyhole.

Aimee was circling back to the point where the first leg of the main tunnel intersected with the main passageways to the left and to the right. She glanced into an open cubbyhole, and she did a double take. Was that …?

Aimee frowned and peered into the cubbyhole. She’d seen a flash of something red toward the back of the cubbyhole.

Crawling in through the open door, Aimee reached for what she’d seen. She couldn’t quite grasp it, so she crawled the rest of the way into the cubbyhole just as her fingers closed over … her lost friendship bracelet. Wow. How weird was that?

Suddenly, Aimee’s cubbyhole door swished shut, snapping into place. The tiny space went dim, lit only by the rope lights outside the cubbyhole. Their illumination just made it through the tiny window on the cubbyhole door.

“Hey!” Aimee shouted.

She twisted around so she could get the door open again. She whacked her head on the cubbyhole’s wall. “Ow!”

Reaching out, Aimee tried to push the cubbyhole door open. It wouldn’t open.

Outside the cubbyhole, Freddy announced, “Player Two has chosen a hiding spot! Player One, find Player Two! Go!”

“No, no, no!” Aimee shouted.

Aimee pounded on the door, but it still didn’t open. Gulping in ragged breaths, Aimee shifted to shove her shoulder against the door. As she did, her face pressed up against the viewing window.

She looked out at the open door to the cubbyhole across from hers. Not much light fell into the cubbyhole from the rope lights, but the light that did make it revealed …

Aimee’s breath caught, and then it released, along with a scream that contained every single particle of guilt she’d carried for the last ten years.

She now knew what had happened to Mary Jo.

“Player One, find Player Two,” Freddy’s voice ordered.

Sealed inside a cubbyhole for ten long years, Mary Jo’s desiccated corpse had practically mummified. Curled inward, drawn down probably by the dried-up skin, Mary Jo’s body was embracing her backpack, which she held like it was a baby. Had it given her any comfort? It didn’t look like it had.

The skin drawn tight against her bones, Mary Jo’s face was brown and leathery, frozen in what looked at first to be a rigid smile. Mary Jo’s lips were gone, and her mouth was pulled back from her big teeth.

Whimpering, Aimee understood, of course, that Mary Jo hadn’t been smiling when she’d died. She’d probably been screaming, crying out for someone to hear her, to find her.

Aimee frantically shifted positions and kicked out at the door with both feet. It didn’t do any good. She didn’t have the room to pull her feet back far enough to get any power behind the kick. They just thumped the door ineffectually.

Outside the cubbyhole, Freddy nudged, “Player One, find Player Two.”

Aimee pounded on her cubbyhole door again. She kicked at it over and over. She threw herself at it. It didn’t budge.

Clearly, the game wasn’t functioning right. The doors weren’t going to open.

Aimee’s heart crawled up into her throat. She began to hyperventilate, and she started begging, “Please, no!”

Once again, she pressed her face to the little window as if she could look for help. Nothing but Mary Jo’s silent corpse looked back at her. Aimee threw herself at the door. It remained closed.

She started scratching at the edges of it. She dug at the rubber seal, trying to gouge it out.

Crying and wincing as her nails broke off, Aimee clawed and clawed. But the rubber seal remained impervious to her attack. It didn’t even leave a mark on it.

Aimee sagged against the door. Sour-smelling sweat ran down her neck and trickled along her spine.

Surely someone would hear her eventually, wouldn’t they?

They didn’t hear Mary Jo, she thought.

Aimee began to tremble, and she forced herself to remain calm. It was going to be okay.

She wasn’t like Mary Jo. People cared about her. Her parents would come looking for her. Her friends would look for her. Her car was in the restaurant’s parking lot. Kim would remember her. Mary would remember that Aimee had asked where the restrooms were. They’d know she was in here.

But would they? Really?

No one knew the Hiding Maze was back here. Why would anyone look in an old crawl space for a missing woman?

Maybe they’d see the grate and—

“Find Player Two,” Freddy’s voice intoned.

Aimee lost all semblance of calm and gave in to panic. She started wailing, and then she shrieked. She shrieked until her throat burned and spasmed. And then she swallowed, and she screamed some more.

Aimee screamed until her lungs forced her to stop and fill them. Then she started crying. She sobbed at first, and then, thinking about her abandoned friend, she wailed.

Mary Jo had died the same way she’d lived, Aimee realized. She’d died because no one had cared enough about her to do whatever was necessary to take care of her.

“Find Player Two,” Freddy’s voice repeated.

Aimee pounded on the door of the cubbyhole and screamed at the top of her lungs.

---

Mary approached the nice young woman’s booth and frowned at the soda sitting on the table next to the unopened menu. The soda clearly hadn’t been touched. It was no longer fizzing, and at least half the ice had melted; a ring of condensation was pooling on the table’s slick wood surface.

No one stayed in a restroom that long. The woman must have left.

Mary glanced up and saw Kim heading her way with an elderly couple in tow. Shrugging, Mary picked up the abandoned soda and menu, quickly wiped the table, and pointed at it. “You can seat them here, Kim. My last customer took off, I guess.”

Kim smiled, nodded, and helped the couple get settled in the booth. As soon as Kim left, Mary grinned at her new customers. “Hi, I’m Mary,” she said. “How are you doing today?”

---

From the vent near the hallway leading to the restrooms, an ever-so-faint scream reached out into the dining room. Its echo lingered for a couple seconds, but the sound was inconsequential.

It didn’t stand a chance of being heard.